Rewarding Points

I can think of a dozen regular posters that contribute little more than noise and the occasional three word grunt.  I fear that offering incentives would only make things worse.  Much, much worse....

Perhaps the Slashdot method would work here?  By default, the lowest rated posts/posters aren't visible.  If your contributions are consistently high quality your content will be visible, if not it disappears from view unless someone has specifically configured their account to show all content regardless of quality.  In theory, I think it encourages high quality content but even if it doesn't at least you don't have to be bothered with all the crap since it's invisible to you.

TheGrobe---i am sorry but my english is quite poor...do yo agree or disagree with me in your post???

Why?

The reasons should be pretty obvious, especially when you start adding punishments for users/threads with low approval ratings.

1. Popularity will be a huge factor. You will have non contributing members with +10000000 points because they are more well liked than another contributing member who is simply not known.

My belief is that popularity will be largely based on the quality of posts anyway so they're basically one and the same.  Remember, it's not just posters but otherwise silent readers that would be contributing their ratings.

2. Way too easy to abuse. What's to stop me, or anyone else, from rating down everyones posts? Nothing besides limiting the amount of +'s or -'s you're allowed to give per day; but even then there will be plenty of abusing the system.

Again, I think this will be drowned out be legitimate voting.  There are a lot of other sites out there who have implemented this type of thing successfully so there is a precedent.

3. Who judges what's good and what's bad? The chess.com community? You mean the same community responsible for continuously generating, day by day, this content that you all find so objectionable as to suggest that a system be in place to prevent it?

I think there's a large contingent of the community that currently simply abstains from participating in those topics so as not to perpetuate them.  Again, I'd expect that providing them a way to silently voice their discontent with such a topic would actually be beneficial.

4. Why should people even care about this? Ask this question to yourself, "is chess.com perfect in every way, save for forum content" if you answered yes then you're probably an idiot, and if you answered no then you will likely agree that the time could be much better spent elsewhere.

This is a quesiton of priority, not one of whether it's an idea worth including for prioritization.  It may not get ranked at the top of the list but I think it should at least be on the list.

Oh, and not everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot..., especially on subjective matters such as this.

And more...

It would have to be the staff who votes, to keep it honest

If you think that chess.com is perfect (100%) for everyone, you certainly are an idiot.

The perfect website can't exist because someone will no doubt have a problem with it. That's hardly subjective.

Responses.

1. Not necessarily, though in some cases this will be true. I do consider it unlikely that a good poster will ever have a negative rating, but that's not to say that all good posters will automatically have good ratings, or that some bad posters won't have good ratings.

2. On as large a scale as chess.com? The forums I've seen this happening on are usually very small and the points are often only added or subtracted by moderators. Do you have any links?

3. I agree with the first bit.

4. Of course. I was simply giving another reason why I don't think this idea should even be looked at by the chess.com staff.

The Slashdot system handles a lot of traffic -- at least as much as the chess.com forums.  It's not uncommon for articles to have several thousand comments.  Anyone who thinks a system like this doesn't work should find one of these heavily commented Slashdot articles and play with the threshhold settings -- you'll notice very quickly that if you set the threshhold to 3 the quality of comments is extremely high.  The inane "first post" type of comments disappear very quickly and it doesn't take long for the cream to rise to the top.  Since members don't acquire "status symbols" like member points or stars or ratings of any kind, popularity contests simply aren't a factor. 

As chess.com grows a system like this becomes more important.  It's getting harder and harder to find quality posts.  I'm sure they are here but if I can't find them because of an adverse signal to noise ratio then the forums have very little value.  That's why this issue is important to me.

Huh? Do you even know what subjective means?

The Slashdot system handles a lot of traffic -- at least as much as the chess.com forums. It's not uncommon for articles to have several thousand comments. Anyone who thinks a system like this doesn't work should find one of these heavily commented Slashdot articles and play with the threshhold settings -- you'll notice very quickly that if you set the threshhold to 3 the quality of comments is extremely high. The inane "first post" type of comments disappear very quickly and it doesn't take long for the cream to rise to the top. Since members don't acquire "status symbols" like member points or stars or ratings of any kind, popularity contests simply aren't a factor.

As chess.com grows a system like this becomes more important. It's getting harder and harder to find quality posts. I'm sure they are here but if I can't find them because of an adverse signal to noise ratio then the forums have very little value. That's why this issue is important to me.

Nytik. The name you were looking for is Nytik.

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To the topic of the thread. I support the Slashdot system. Besides, it could hardly affect me negatively.... could it?